Christian realism and the new GOP

The new Republican coalition on display was the most fascinating part of this week’s national convention in Milwaukee, but it was not without its challenges for conservative Christians.

Foreign policy interventionism is out. The convention stressed that economies were made for workers and not workers for the economy. Traditional social conservatism took a noticeable back seat at this convention. Little was said about debt, taxes, judges, or national defense (I do appreciate J.D. Vance giving an appreciable nod to religious liberty in his speech).

The Republican Party under former President Donald Trump includes the following coalition within its ranks: free-market conservatives, anti-woke libertarians, religious conservatives, America First nationalists, economic populists, and national security hawks. No taxonomy is perfect, and individuals can find themselves in multiple groupings. To triangulate what the shared goal would be among the disparate factions is this: a renewed consensus around American greatness and national cohesion and a repudiation of globalism, wokeism, and secular progressivism.

Making sense of political coalitions is challenging, especially for conservative Christians who find themselves often voting Republican. But it is vital to do so to understand what political parties are, by definition, and what they are designed to do, which is to win.

Politics requires the uncomfortable coordination of disparate factions within a broad coalition to accomplish a particular goal. Those goals may not be the same for all the factions within a coalition, but everyone understands that a shared destination better represents their interests than the alternative. That requires assembling majorities. It means persuasion. It means working alongside well, weird, coalitions. There has never been a political configuration that did not comprise unlikely alliances. We should stop acting as though it ever did.

Politics does not occur in the vacuums of idealism. It exists amid weird equilibriums and awkward configurations. That is not simply a political reality—it is a Biblical reality, too. The Bible portrays political actors and worldly regimes as fallen, yet at the same time, morally accountable to God’s transcendent moral laws. Flaws, tensions, and imperfections are woven into the fabric of politics because politics exists amid the fragmentation of broken human beings operating on a broken platform. If we expect politics to be clean, neat, and tidy, we should retreat into the catacombs.

I say all of that because, right now, conservative Christians are, understandably, upset that the size of the pie we thought we had within the conservative coalition is smaller than we initially thought. But I would like to remind conservative evangelicals that a Republican platform, a Republican Party, and a Republican president are not ecclesiastical offices or confessional documents. That certainly does not mean they evade accountability to God’s moral law. There is no forfeiture of integrity insofar as members in a coalition are willing to speak the truth, regardless of the cost. For example, a Republican Party that allows a porn star to speak on stage or that weakens key socially conservative planks deserves unequivocal criticism. It is shameful that the Republican Party would be a vessel of degeneracy and decadence. We should not hesitate to say so. While pro-life initiatives have suffered a string of losses, the message from social conservatives to the GOP is that Republicans cannot win elections by marginalizing social conservatives. Social conservatism should be more prominent within the Republican platform, not less. Social conservatives are not going to beg for table scraps from secular conservatives. Furthermore, conservatism has no moral ground to stand on apart from what religious and social conservatives bring to the table.

If you are upset about elements of the Republican platform and coalition, as I am, I would remind you that nothing in politics is permanent, even if the convictions one hopes to see win are. Politics is subject to the vicissitudes of changing times and moments. What I would not do is encourage you to take your ball and go home.

Christians must remove starry-eyed illusions of politics as performing arts. Trite platitudes about Christians being above the political fray matter very little in the real world. Policies that will harm or prosper the commonwealth do not care about anguished moral preening. We will be a nation that aborts our children, or we will not be. We can sit back and talk about how “Christians don’t worship donkeys or elephants. We worship the Lamb.” We do worship the Lamb of God, but that same Lamb of God we worship does not call us to evacuate the conditions of the world He created and calls all human beings, even fallen ones, to honor. We must take political parties and coalitions day by day in our evaluation of them.

Abdicating political responsibility among the kingdoms of man in the name of white-glove piety would mean we deserve to lose because we will have surrendered the playing field. All this means that Christians should not forsake being political. As one of my former bosses liked to say, “Silence never wins.” If you are like me and frustrated about the un-Biblical concessions the GOP has made, let me suggest: Do politics better than those who are trying to do politics better than you. Make arguments. Show up. Build coalitions. Continued moral idealism and political realism are what is required. Never back down from speaking the truth, even while working within less-than-ideal constraints.

It is a choice to give up and stop making arguments and promoting the good. We do not have to make that choice.